Infrastructure Automation

Τhe suite of technologies, methodologies, and practices designed to facilitate the swift and confident release of software while ensuring the seamless operation of systems. All companies aim to accelerate innovation, enabling efficient experimentation with new features, reducing time-to-market, enhancing scalability, and fortifying resilience against system failures.

The Journey

The journey to infrastructure automation involves assessing needs, navigating complexity, standardizing builds, selecting tools, transitioning to modern practices, addressing monitoring challenges, and refining processes for efficiency and resilience.

Challenges

Embarking on a transformation journey of transitioning current manually provisioned systems to one managed by fully automated pipelines is the challenge. As organizations grow, the infrastructure required to support their operations becomes more intricate and distributed. Complexity represents a primary obstacle, and companies diligently endeavor to mitigate its effects. The path toward automation is non-linear; companies must balance the imperatives of current business needs while adhering to established practices and patterns. Although immediate implementation of ideal solutions may be deferred, prioritization of automation in response to emerging requirements is crucial, leveraging such opportunities for value assessment, feedback gathering, and experimentation.

Key Considerations For Maintaining Clean Builds

Maintaining clean builds is imperative, with project construction ideally accomplished through a single command, while the build script is written by the development team. Companies must have standardized builds across all environments, with environment-specific variables injected at a later stage.

Key Τechnologies & Τools for Ιmplementing Infrastructure Αutomation Solutions

Linux processes managed by systems on private virtual servers are the traditional and battle-tested way of running services, albeit not aligned with contemporary standards. The market anticipates a transition to containerized solutions in the future, and deliberations regarding orchestrator selection, such as Kubernetes, Nomad, or Docker Swarm, must carefully consider potential complexities vis-à-vis our specific use-case requirements.

Logging, monitoring, and observability pose formidable challenges, with significant ramifications for system quality and outage recovery. While imperative, these endeavors must be judiciously executed to avoid unnecessary costs and ineffective monitoring practices. The deployment of self-configured setups versus managed solutions entails careful consideration while ensuring the efficacy of alarms and dashboards remains a critical concern.

Configuration Management Tools

Ansible is a provisioning tool with proven efficacy and an extensive ecosystem. However, its lack of state management akin to Terraform necessitates test deployments for verification. To mitigate this limitation, informal APIs within Ansible roles are used to facilitate resource management and lifecycle event handling, albeit with a nuanced trade-off in confidence compared to Terraform’s explicit change tracking.

While GitOps presents potential benefits, its prioritization is deferred. The initial focus remains on manual workflow triggering, with a comprehensive evaluation of platform features, costs, and limitations. Development and debugging of additional components are deemed preferable over immediate GitOps integration.